March 19, 2018 – Chinese daily newspaper, Reference News, reported on its official website that the internationally-renowned Forrester released its "Cloud Data Warehouse, Q1 2018" report. This report comprehensively evaluated the primary functions, regional performance, market segments, typical customers, and other features of big data service providers.
Forrester reports are extremely influential within the cloud industry and are often regarded as the guidebooks for CIOs of major international companies. Based on these criteria, Forrester elected four companies: AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Google, and Microsoft. Alibaba Cloud was the only Chinese tech company selected.
Cloud-based big data services have been in high demand in recent years due to the advantages of security, elastic scalability, rapid deployment, and low costs. Conversely, locally deployed big data analytic solutions are gradually becoming obsolete. In its evaluation, Forrester required each supplier to meet the following criteria:
1) Sophisticated big data warehouse products
2) Independent big data warehouse solutions
3) Big data use cases
4) Publicly available products
5) A leading position in regional markets
6) Advanced technology
In 2009, Alibaba reached the Greenplum ceiling. It was difficult to scale up Greenplum beyond one hundred hosts and 1000 TB. However, even such maximum capacity was far from enough to support a thriving business like Alibaba Cloud.
Due to the advantages of security, elastic scalability, rapid deployment, and low costs, the cloud-based big data services have been in high demand in recent years. Last year, Forrester reported that, although cloud data warehouse (CDW) enterprises provided excellent cloud-based features, many cloud companies exhibited deficiencies in areas such as global deployment, data security, integration, modeling, and governance.
The next-gen big data language NewSQL, which combines the advantages Declarative and Imperative coding, breaks through the technical restrictions of the previous SQL language. The unified programming language provides support for offline, quasi-real-time, stream, graphic, machine learning, and other computing modes and unstructured data processing. This greatly reduces the technical barriers to big data development.
At the 2015 Sort Benchmark competition, Apsara set four new GraySort and MinuteSort world records.
FuxiSort sorted 100 TB of data in 377 seconds.
It used a shared testing environment, dual gigabit NICs, and mechanical hard disks.
At the 2016 Sort Benchmark competition, Apsara set two new CloudSort world records.
NADSort sorted 100 TB of data at a cost of $144 ($1.44/TB).
As a leading cloud computing vendor, Alibaba Cloud serves 2.3 million customers in over 200 countries and regions around the world. The company holds a 47.6% share of the public cloud market in China, equaling to almost all competitors combined.